Your PCS requirements

The Medical Council framework now requires doctors to record a professional development plan (PDP) every year. A PDP provides you with an important opportunity to reflect on your individual practice and plan engagement in learning activities relative to your individual scope and stage of practice that will enhance your practice.

It also provides an opportunity to plan the necessary time and finances required to engage in the relevant learning activity. It is not a tool for use by an employer, training body nor the Medical Council to assess your performance.

You must develop and update your PDP annually. Engaging in activities to implement the PDP will be a self-directed process for which you, and only you, will be responsible. The annual plan will be informed by your current and future CPD opportunities linked to your scope of practice. PDPs should reflect the application of the eight domains of good professional practice.

If you are engaged in the practice of medicine you must undertake a clinical or practice audit, quality improvement, or an evaluation project to review and enhance practice.

Clinical audit is a clinically-led quality improvement process, involving the structure, processes and outcomes of care, that seeks to improve patient  experience and outcomes through the systematic review of care against explicit criteria and acting to improve care when standards are not met. If required, improvements should be implemented at an individual, team or organisation level and then the care re-evaluated to confirm improvements. Audits can be undertaken at individual, practice, specialty, hospital, or national level.

Quality improvement is the defining of a problem, studying the variation within that problem, formulating a goal, and then developing a hypothesis about the potential interventions or changes that might work to achieve this goal. These changes or interventions are then tested on a small scale to verify whether they have achieved the predicted outcome.

Practice evaluation is a systematic assessment of the performance of an individual or a group of doctors by members of the same profession or team, or by patients.

Work-based learning involves your reflection of your clinical and non-clinical work. When you participate in work-based learning you analyse and assess areas of your professional practice to gain insight on best practice and improvements where possible. Work-based learning aims to make an individual more aware of their own professional knowledge and action by ‘challenging assumptions of everyday practice and critically evaluating practitioners’ own responses to practice situations.

Example of activity include:

• Grand rounds, multi-disciplinary team meetings, journal clubs
• Management, policy and committee meetings
• Personal reading or study (journals, textbooks, web journals etc.)
• Publications
• Journal clubs
• In-house education provided by your employer

Accredited CPD activity includes your attendance at relevant educational conferences, courses, and workshops at local, national, international level, and accredited CPD offered in the workplace. This includes clinical or non-clinical CPD.

It is important that a CPD activity used to count for your annual CPD requirement must be accredited in Ireland or in the state where it is delivered and be considered acceptable to the operator of your PCS as meeting international standards.

Example of activity include:

• Local, regional, national, international accredited meetings
• Conferences/seminars/webinars
• Presentations to scientific meetings, training bodies, colleges, medical societies
• Education, training and simulation programmes
• Courses, workshops, seminars, diplomas
• Online learning courses, modules, workshops
• Masterclass series and webcasts
• Relevant academic qualification (degree, diploma, course)